As 2020 approaches its last quarter, scientists around the globe continue their all-consuming efforts to find effective therapeutics and vaccines to fight the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, which currently has a 3.35% fatality rate and has been plaguing the world for more than half a year. While the fight rages on, people are growing weary of political posturing and community debates. They face a serious conundrum of how to best protect those vulnerable to the virus, while still considering the psychological and economic impacts of societal lockdowns.
Although investors’ enthusiasm has cooled toward the biopharma sector, particularly large cap companies, over the past couple of months, they haven’t neglected it entirely and have been willing to reward those companies reporting positive news about their pipeline progress. As a result, a number of companies returned significant gains in their share valuations in August, contributing to the BioWorld Drug Developers index pushing more than 4% higher in the period and up 6% year-to-date.
It has proved to be a lackluster summer for the biopharmaceutical sector, with the BioWorld Biopharmaceutical index dropping about 2% in value during the past two months, in contrast to the general markets that have enjoyed a much stronger period.
Without a doubt, efforts to fight COVID-19 have dominated the flow of money into the biopharma industry through nonprofit collaborations and grants, accounting for 87% and 85% of the 2020 totals, respectively. Out of the 590 bio/nonprofit deals tracked by BioWorld this year, a total of $7.18 billion has been recorded, but 283 deals valued at $6.24 billion are directly focused on providing therapies for the pandemic.
Detailed research over the past decade has shown that that the protein stimulator of interferon genes (STING) is a master regulator of type I interferons and as such plays an essential role in activating innate immunity. STING’s importance in orchestrating the body’s response to pathogenic, tumor, or self-DNA in the cytoplasm has made it a hot target in immunology research and drug discovery and several biopharma companies have started programs dedicated to this area spanning infectious and inflammatory diseases as well as cancer.
After a steady upward trend since the beginning of the year, the BioWorld Infectious Diseases index has hit a speed bump for the first time and dropped almost 8% so far in August. Companies in the group focusing on treatments for COVID-19 took the brunt of the valuation decline as investors became notably anxious about other drug developers making it to market sooner with their COVID-19 therapies.
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